Ubuntu's Edge Smartphone Just Out-Crowdfunded Pebble's Smartwatch

The Ubuntu Edge smartphone has just received pledges that total over $10.3 million on Indiegogo, TheNextWeb.com reports. That places its crowdfunded income above that of the Pebble smartwatch, which was previously the most highly paid crowdfunded device—albeit on Kickstarter rather than Indiegogo.

It's a huge success for Canonical, the team behind Ubuntu, but there's a critical difference between these two bits of hardware: Pebble actually beat its funding target and has gone on sale commercially. The Edge phone is still about $20 million shy of its astronomically huge $32 million crowdfunding goal and has just six days of funding time left.

Canonical has struggled to keep pledges rolling in after an initially impressive flood of promises from consumers keen to buy the strange dual-boot Linux-and-Android device. The company has had to adjust its pricing brackets several times on Indiegogo to drive up pledge levels. The injection of a surprisingly large $80,000 amount from publisher Bloomberg definitely helped the project, but not by much.

The project is now entering a critical phase of funding and seems destined to fall short of its goal unless it can persuade the public and enterprise sources to pledge about $3.5 million a day. Crowdfunded projects can sometimes seem to gain a burst of cash in the last days as PR efforts are stepped up, and this definitely has worked for other big crowdfunded projects like the Elite: Dangerous computer game, but the odds aren't in Canonical's favor.